The biggest fear in my
mind when Big Finish announced they would be including Sutekh in the second
volume of The New Adventures of Bernice
Summerfield was that it would be a set for spectacle and no substance. My fears only increased when Big Finish
released “Transmission from Mars”, a video trailer to increase the hype for the
story. The trailer was of Bernice Summerfield
warning people on Mars that Sutekh is back and increased hype for the release
of the set. It was a really good trailer
and the trailer actually turned out to be a filmed version of a sequence in the
first story of the box set. While it is
prefaced in the story with a bit of a prologue explaining Benny being on a dig,
the Doctor being in a sarcophagus and the servant of Sutekh, and the guide
being killed, the story only increases in tension from there. The plot is a bit weak from there however as
it is a rehash of Part Four of Pyramids
of Mars for like ten minutes, before we get to the character drama. The story remains to escape from the pyramid,
but once the version of the two doors with two guards comes up everything comes
to a different place.
The roof explodes and one
of the mummy guardians decides to help Benny escape, but this is only
interesting because it has the voice of Jason Kane. The mummy thinks it’s going to help Benny and
a lot of the puzzles are interesting, but Benny has a lot to say to her dead
husband. It’s really something that
allows us to see how death affects the character in the long run of the stories
which is a development that I really like overall. Then it’s reveled that it’s the mummy that
always tells lies which increases the heartbreak. Lisa Bowerman really plays to her strengths
in this audio as she knows the ins and outs of Benny as a character and is
having a good time working with Gabriel Woolf and Sylvester McCoy. The story
pushes Benny to her limits as she has to ingest Osiran DNA, and become a
literal god to try and destroy Sutekh in the end. It would be a good plan if it wasn’t for the
fact Sutekh can just take away the colonists to the land of death with a blink
of an eye. Benny nearly dies because of this
which sets the tone for the rest of the box set as a more tense series of
adventures dealing with a literal god of death.
The story doesn’t drag at all as the tension continues to rise through
the hour long runtime of the plot until the end where Ace shows up. Yeah, while Sophie Aldred is billed on the
cover of the story, Ace appears in the last three minutes to take Benny away in
the TARDIS.
Sylvester McCoy on the
other hand is in the story much longer than Ace is. He really isn’t playing the Doctor for very
much of it, but the servant of Sutekh, killing people, bringing death to the
land. He goes completely over the top in
the story whenever his mind is taken over which is a good way of doing the
story as you see the reserved Doctor break through whenever Sutekh loses his
grip. Bringing Sutekh back into the
story is the Doctor, who while under his influences grafts together a body
using flesh looms which is a terrifying image as you see Benny come across an
entire room of bodies. Sutekh played by
Gabriel Woolf is almost more intimidating while on audio as you can imagine the
body made of differing flesh, grafted together from different parts which makes
the god even more terrifying than he was in Pyramids
of Mars. Woolf is having fun unleashing that voice and it helps the story
along.
To summarize, The Pyramid of Sutekh has the flaw that
it rehashes a lot of plot from Pyramids
of Mars as a set up for the box set.
This isn’t the worst thing that could happen for the story, but it isn’t
very good either. The story still
manages to be an entertaining base under siege style chase through the tunnels
of a pyramid with the brilliantly written and performed characters of Bernice
Summerfield, the Doctor, and Sutekh. Guy
Adams’s story is still a flawed story but it is a great one. 85/100.
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